Black: Can I just say for the record that Lethal Weapon: The Director's Cut is not the director's cut?

Wright: Really?!

Black: I was there. And unless the Richard Donner had some kind of spiritual awakening between the filming and the release... I saw him choose between two scenes where Gibson is introduced. They put them both back in, but it's in no way the intended film -- it's just a chance to make some more money.

Wright: That's the scene with the sniper, right?

Black: He beats up some thugs when we introduce him to show how crazy he is, then we introduce him with the sniper to show how crazy he is, and then we introduce him in the Christmas tree lot to show how crazy he is. He's introduced three times. That's not the director's cut -- that's called "The Asshole, Dredge Up Anything You Fucking Can, Put It Out There, and Let Some Schmuck Look at It for $13.99 Cut."

Wright: [Laughs, spills his coffee] Ridley Scott seems to be the only person who has two director's cuts that are actually shorter than the original.

Black: And better.

Wright: With Alien, in particular -- not only does he put two scenes in but it winds up being 45 seconds shorter.

Black: Ridley Scott has a clear vision in his head of the perfect movie and over the years he's had his little regrets like, Gee, I wish this were a little more fleshed out, or I wish this didn't quite take so long. So many people today, especially with these action films, they go: What have we got?

Wright: They do it with comedies, too. There make these unrated, extra-long versions and you can't buy the originals anymore. Like Anchorman. They put in all these takes that aren't as funny as the theatrical version. My favorite line in Anchorman isn't even on the DVD -- when Steve Carell is saying how hungover he is and he says, "I ate a big red candle."

The other thing about extended editions is when people go back and ruin the film. Like The Exorcist -- "the version you've never seen." And Star Wars, although Lucas finally re-released the original version. It just fucks with the films -- you can put updated special effects into them -- but those are going to be dated in twenty years time, anyway!

Black: It's almost as bad as colorization.

Wright: I don't believe that when George Lucas did a scene with Alec Guinness he said, "This scene is really good and his performance is great, but what it really needs is some flying robots behind his head." What the fuck?

Is Grindhouse Any Good?

Wright: One of the camera operators on Hot Fuzz worked on a couple Bond movies and said something that never occurred to me. When you're shooting a car chase you never shoot the car perfectly in frame -- you have to catch up with it. If it's coming on straight, it doesn't look like it's going that fast.

Black: What's hard for me to watch in old movies -- even the good ones -- are the car chases. When the car goes past, the camera pans and follows it, and then the other car comes and the camera pans again.

Wright: While it was jittery, I thought the Bourne Supremacy had good car chases, properly bruising, dangerous. It's like what Quentin said about Death Proof, what is the point of doing CGI car stunts? If you see the trailer for Next or Die Hard 4 the CGI car stuff is totally boring -- there's no danger. But if you see proper car rolls you think, fucking hell.

Black: You gotta hand it to Quentin. When Zoe what's-her-name climbs out there...

Wright: Bell.

Black: She doesn't hesitate. She just climbs right out there. If you didn't know she was a stuntwoman you're just blown away.

Wright: You know I did one of the trailers in the middle of Grindhouse?

Black: Which one? Don't?

Wright: Yeah.

Black: That was great. And Machete -- Machete was great.

Wright: I loved Grindhouse. It's interesting how people were confused by it, how it's so long, and they had to walk out...but that's exactly what people did in those old double bills!

Black: Tarantino was literally trying to recreate the experience. If you look at those old car stunt movies, they had one or two really good car chases in between endless chattering away about stuff. You might argue that he was almost too good at recreating those films. But the question arises: If it's on purpose does that make it good?

Wright: I liked it.

Black: I liked it, too.

The Nonsensical World of "Popcorn Logic"

Black: John McTiernan -- who I've had a checkered history with, but he's a nice enough guy -- made the most bizarre movie in Die Hard 3. Some of the violence is so cartoonish -- people will literally fall fifty feet and stand up and go, "Ow, my knee hurts." But that movie also has some of the most bloody, realistic, and riveting scenes. There's this female terrorist who carries around a scythe and slits people's throats. It has these really adult, realistic cop story thrills, then the rest of it is a comic book where they're sitting on top of a giant bomb like an old episode of Batman.

Wright: [Laughs] It's like "popcorn logic" -- the longer it goes, the dumber it gets. In the last half hour of Hot Fuzz Nicholas Angel's sentences get shorter and pithier and more monosyllabic, to the point he just says, "Idea." With popcorn logic, physics and logic go out the window in pursuit of the thrills.

Black: Right. Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie.

Wright: Which happens all the way through the last half hour of Hot Fuzz!

Black: It's intentional.

Wright: Absolutely, yeah. We had the bit in the supermarket with the two butchers throwing knives from behind a counter -- and there's a bit of curved glass in the deli counter. We couldn't afford to make it breakaway because they said it would cost 8,000 pounds, so I decided to make it bulletproof. We even put CGI hits on there to make it look more like this supermarket is so full of psychos they're prepared for the Apocalypse.

Black: [Laughs]

There Are No British Action Films

Black: Now here's my question to you. In Hot Fuzz, they turn on the TV...what movies are they watching?

Black: Why specifically American movies? There must be some British action movies?

Wright:There aren't! I swear to God. There are gangster films, but no British action films -- there hasn't been a British cop movie for more than thirty years. The last one was a terrible comedy in 1982 called The Boys in Blue, with this sub-sub-sub Abbot and Costello double act called "Cannon and Ball." Prior to that... You ever heard of a TV show called The Sweeney?

Black: No.

Wright: A famous, really tough, really big '70s TV cop show. It had two feature spin-offs -- The Sweeney and The Sweeney 2. Before that there's Sir Sean Connery in The Offense...

Black:The Avengers was action.

Wright: Yeah, but again, a TV series rather than a film.

Black: There's Brannigan -- at least that's set in London. Look at Luc Besson. He makes this one wonderful action film, La Femme Nikita, and it's groundbreaking. It's set in Europe. Everything since is him trying to be a fucking American. All those movies sucked dick.

Wright: Even The Professional?

Black: I hate The Professional. It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made.

Wright: Not worse than The Cradle of Life?

Black: I would rather see any other film before I'd see The Professional again. I'd see nature films, how to fix your car films, anything.

Wright: That's one of the reasons we made Hot Fuzz -- there are no British films like this.

Black: I like that you give it the Lethal Weapon treatment, even though there's obviously nothing to warrant that in this small sleepy town...

Wright: I actually pitched it as Rural Weapon. True story!

Remakes and the Law of Diminishing Returns

Wright: I hate when remakes taint the original. Like, the first Halloween -- it's so well directed, the set-ups are great. My favorite bit is at the end when Donald Pleasance looks down and Michael Myers has vanished -- they cut around all these different locations and it's kind of like a game of "Where's Waldo." You're thinking, Where is he now? He could be in anyone of these places... It's so simple, but scary.

Black: It's brilliant -- caps the film and you walk out satisfied. How many have there been now? Nine?

Wright: Yeah. And a remake coming. Which nobody wants.

Black: There's this uniform look in horror movies made since 1999 -- they're all cut from the same slab of stuff. What's the difference between The Hills Have Eyes, The Amityville Horror...

Wright: ...The Hitcher...

Black: They all look the same, they sound the same, they have the same jump-out scares -- which I hate...

Wright: It's easy to dismiss remakes, but in the '70s and '80s they did it right. You had Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Fly, and The Thing, which were all great because they found ways to make them new. The Fly is the perfect remake because it's updated for the decade and there's a totally new metaphor that wasn't there before. None of these new ones do that -- especially The Omen -- they're like bland versions of the original.

Black: They all feel like these cookie-cutter, Americanized versions, made from the same batter.

Wright: I got asked to do a remake. I went to a meeting at Paramount that I thought was a general meeting and -- this is the thing that weirded me out -- the first thing the executive says to me is, "Now, about The Crazies remake..." I thought I'd missed a half an hour of the meeting! They're asking me to remake The Crazies, and I'm thinking, Now why would I do that?

Black: The what?

Wright:The Crazies. It's the movie George Romero made between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. It's similar to 28 Days Later.

Black: But there's no reason to remake it.

Wright: I think somebody is doing it. What annoys me most about these remakes is this: Why not just call them something else? I love the original Assault On Precinct 13. But what does that title mean to anybody under thirty?

Black: The standards for these types of movies are so homogenized -- look at Deep Blue Sea.

Wright: Didn't that film get re-shot so that L.L. Cool J could live?

Black: Yes.

Wright: And also that Saffron Burrows could die? She was supposed to be the hero of the film, but they hated her character so much that they re-shot it so that she died and he lived!